Get-tough prison policies and their resulting increase in corrections spending have not significantly affected crime rates. / File photo by PATRICIA BECK/Detroit Free Press

Commentary: Base prison cuts on reality, not politics

BY JEFF GERRITT

DETROIT FREE PRESS EDITORIAL WRITER

With Michigan spending more money on prisons than higher education, everyone knows we cough up too much on corrections. The question is how to spend less: Reduce the state's enormous prison population -- or cut costs by privatizing prison operations, slashing programs, improving efficiencies and lowering employee pay and benefits?

As the conversation continues, a ferociously partisan Legislature should heed former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk. In his book, "Cities without Suburbs," he states that policy debates "must be framed not as a choice between conservative and liberal philosophies, but as a choice between policies that work and policies that do not work."

No government program has worked less than the race to incarcerate. In Michigan and other states, prison populations -- driven by mandatory minimum sentences, three-strike laws and other get-tough policies -- have more than quadrupled over the last 35 years. But the prison boom has not demonstrably influenced crime rates, which have continued to go up and down.

In fact, despite the wailing of local prosecutors, crime rates in Michigan have fallen in recent years, even as parole rates have gone up. Credit the Michigan Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative for some of that success. Since 2007, when the state locked up a record 51,554 inmates, the prison population has fallen to 44,000 today.

The price tag is still enormous. Michigan spends $2 billion a year on corrections -- a staggering 24% of the state's general fund, with each inmate costing an average of $35,000 a year to incarcerate.

No doubt, Michigan should try to make the Department of Corrections more efficient. In good times or bad, government should spend carefully the money hardworking people all over Michigan send to Lansing. But politicians often promise far more than they can deliver with efficiencies.

Privatizing MDOC's food service operation, for example, is often cited. But Corrections spends just over $2 a day to feed each inmate. Short of starving prisoners, how much money can the state squeeze there?

Moreover, Corrections' experience with using private companies has been shaky at best. Take the now-closed Michigan Youth Correctional Facility in Baldwin, run by a private, for-profit company. The Legislature's own independent auditor concluded that the so-called punk prison was one of Michigan's most inefficient institutions.

Privatized prison health care created a dysfunctional and deadly system that brought national shame to Michigan following the "Neglect in Custody" series I wrote four years ago. Using private companies is no panacea.

No doubt, corrections officers in Michigan, typically earning $45,000 to $50,000 a year, make more than officers in Mississippi. But the state should want well-trained, professional, career-minded corrections officers. It won't get them paying fast-food wages.

The largest potential for saving paper still comes from safely reducing the prison population and closing prisons. If Michigan had an incarceration rate similar to those of neighboring states, it would save an estimated $400 million a year.

Michigan doesn't send more people to prison than other states, but it keeps them there far longer. Michigan prisoners serve an average of nearly 140% of their minimum sentence, even though length of stay does not affect recidivism rates. Restoring good time credits and restricting how long the Parole Board could keep inmates -- Michigan's 34 prisons still hold 10,000 parole-eligible prisoners -- would reduce Michigan's prison population and provide incentives for changing behavior.

Everyone wants a state that spends more on educating people than locking them up. But the criminal justice and prison policies of the last 35 years have failed to make us safer, while costing billions of dollars that government could better spend on education and other services.

Pragmatic businesspeople know it hasn't worked. Four years ago, Rich Studley, vice president of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, asked: "Why is it that Michigan, compared to other states, puts more people in prison for longer periods of time for no difference in crime rates or recidivism?"

The answer hasn't changed: Spineless or clueless politicians continue to stoke the public's fears instead of focusing on policies that work.

JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.